Chosen Prey

by John Sandford

  “That’s right. The more names we get, the better the chances of a cross. And the more people we can find who have gotten these drawings, the bigger the lists will be.”

  “What’re you gonna do?” Marcy asked.

  “Go talk to the movie people about some publicity,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna put the pictures on the street.”

  4

  CHANNEL THREE WAS located in a low, rambling stone structure, a fashionable architect’s attempt to put a silk purse on a corner that cried out for a pig’s ear; Lucas had never liked the place. The building was a brisk crosstown walk from City Hall, and during the walk, Lucas thought for a moment that he’d seen a slice of blue in the sky, then decided that he’d been wrong. There was no blue; there never would be. He grinned at his own mood, and a woman he was passing nodded at him.

  Lucas had a full-sized Xerox of the Aronson drawing in his pocket, along with partial copies of the other three drawings; in those three, the faces had been carefully scissored out. He met Jennifer Carey in the Channel Three parking lot, where she was smoking a cigarette. She was tall and blond and the mother of Lucas’s only child, his daughter, Sarah. Sarah lived with Carey and her husband.

  “Lucas,” Carey said, snapping the cigarette into the street. A shower of sparks puffed out of the wet blacktop.

  “You know those things cause cancer,” Lucas said.

  “Really? I’ll have to do a TV show on it.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “What’s happening? Where’d you get the hickey?”

  “That’s it, I’m buying a turtleneck,” Lucas said.

  “You’d look like a French thug,” Carey said. “I could kind of go for it. . . . So you’re back with Weather?”

  “Yeah. Looks like,” he said.

  “Gonna do the deed?”

  “Probably.”

  “Good for you,” she said. She looped her arm in his and tugged him along toward the door of the building. “I always liked that woman. I can’t imagine how a little thing like a shooting came between you.”

  “She had the guy’s brains on her face,” Lucas said. “It made an impression.”

  “The brains? Or the incident? I mean, like a dent? Or did you mean impression, as a metaphor? Because I don’t think brains would really—”

  “Shut up.”

  “God, I love that tone,” she said. “Why don’t we get your handcuffs and find an empty van?”

  “I got a story for you,” Lucas said.

  “Really?” The bullshit stopped. “A good one? Or am I doing your PR?”

  “It’s decent,” Lucas said.

  “So walk this way,” she said. He followed her into the building and through a maze of hallways to her office. A stack of court transcripts occupied her visitor’s chair; she moved them to her desk and said, “Sit down.”

  “This is a purely unofficial visit,” Lucas said. He took the Xerox copy of the Aronson drawing out of his pocket.

  “The best kind,” Carey said. “What’s that paper?”

  “There are a couple of conditions.”

  “You know the kind of conditions we can accept . . . . Can we accept them?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then . . . gimme.”

  Lucas pushed the paper across the desk and Carey unfolded it, looked it over, and said, “She could lose a few pounds.”

  “She has,” Lucas said. “Death will do that for you.”

  “She’s dead?” Carey looked at him over the drawing.

  “That’s Julie Aronson. Her body—”

  “Found her down south, I know the story,” Carey said. She turned her lips down. “We’ve sorta hashed that over. Not that we can’t use it.”

  “Hang on, for Christ’s sakes. Goddamn movie people,” Lucas said. “The thing is, several women have gotten drawings like this—three more that we know of. Two got them in the mail, and a third set was posted on a bulletin board over at the U. We got a freak.”

  She brightened. “You got more pictures?”

  He gave her the other three. She looked at them one at a time, said, “Man,” and then, “These might possibly make a story. It’d be better if we could interview the victims.”

  “I’d have to check. You won’t get them today.”

  “Could we hold off until we get them? Until tomorrow? That’d really pump the story.”

  “No. If you don’t want to use these today, I’ll take them to Eight,” Lucas said.

  “No no no . . . this is fine,” she said hastily. “The biggest thing we’ve got going tonight is a promo for a soap opera. We’ll do the drawings tonight, and then if we could get interviews tomorrow . . . that might even be better. Carry the story longer.”

  “Good. And you’ve got to use them at both five and six o’clock. We want all the other stations screaming for them, scrambling around to catch up, playing them big at ten o’clock. We’re really trying to plaster them around.”

  Carey was no dummy. She looked at him closely and said, “You could do that by calling a press conference. Why the exclusive for us?”

  “Because you used to be my sweetie?”

  “Bullshit, Lucas.”

  “Because we want you to owe us?”

  “There we go. Why?”

  “Another story’s about to break out of City Hall, and there are some consequences that I’d like to . . . manipulate.” He put a hand to his cheek and thought for a second. “That came out wrong.”

  “But it’s probably right,” Carey said. “Manipulate. What’s the second story?”

  “If I tell you, you can’t bury the drawings under the other story. The drawings have gotta be prominent.”

  “Deal,” she said. She looked at her watch. “But there’s not much time. What is it?”

  “The mayor’s not going to run this fall,” Lucas said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “One consequence is that Rose Marie is out—he can’t reappoint her just before the election. I suspect a few other top people are gonna fall, too.”

  Carey stood up, reached toward the phone, stopped. “Who knows this?”

  “The mayor’s walking around City Hall right now, talking to his top people, maybe a couple of people on the council. Word will leak tonight.”

  “Okay.” She picked up the Aronson drawing, held it vertically like a poster, and said, “You know, it’s really pretty good.” Then she folded it, businesslike, and said, “Get out of here. I’ll get the police guy to come see you in twenty minutes about the drawings. I’ll tell him I got them from an insider, but not you. You can be surprised—he won’t know where it’s coming from. I’ll get the mayor myself.”

  “The Aronson picture . . . I mean, her ass is in it. I don’t know if you show asses at five o’clock, but you’ve got to show enough that people get the idea of the style. Same with the others. . . . We need to find the guy who drew them.”

  “I think we can show an ass,” Carey said.

  “The more the better,” Lucas said. “We need a little pop, a little shock. Some talk.”

  “You’ll get talk,” she said. “You can bet your ass on it.”

  BACK AT THE office, Lucas barely had time to get his coat off before the department’s public relations officer called and said that the Channel Three reporter wanted to speak to him. “He says it’s urgent. He’s got a camera with him. You know what it’s about?”

  “I got an idea,” Lucas said. “Send him down.”

  “The movies?” Marcy asked when Lucas hung up.

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said. “You want to take it? I got this goddamned hickey.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ll just pass him on to you.”

  “Jesus, I gotta . . . I gotta . . . my hair looks like somebody peed on it. I gotta . . .” She dashed out of the office.

  Del came in a step ahead of the camera. Lucas was shocked when the reporter asked about the drawings. “Where do you guys get this shit?” Lucas looked sideways at Del, who said, “Hey,
I just met them in the hallway. I never said a word.”

  “I got sources,” the reporter said with a sly smile. “You gonna give us something? We got most of it already.”

  “Sergeant Sherrill’s handling it. We’d decided we might talk to you guys tomorrow. I guess a day early wouldn’t hurt, but the other stations—”

  “Fuck the other stations,” the reporter said. The cameraman was leaning against the wall, and appeared to have gone to sleep. Marcy came back five seconds later. Her hair looked neater and she had some color in her cheeks, either from cold water or slapping herself. And she’d unbuttoned one more button on her blouse; Lucas thought she looked terrific. The cameramen, sensing the presence of an unbuttoned blouse, woke up.

  “What’re we doing?” she asked.

  “Whatever you want to do,” Lucas told her. “You want to go with it?”

  “Say yes,” the reporter said. “We’ll owe you big.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt,” Marcy said, shrugging. “Sure I’ll talk to you.”

  “SO WE GOT two favors owed to us on one story,” Marcy said forty minutes later, as they sat in the bay area of the office watching a portable TV. Carey was on the City Hall steps, reporting that the mayor had confirmed that he wouldn’t be running for reelection in the fall. Channel Three had led with a few shots from the drawings as a teaser—police fear killer-artist stalks Minneapolis woman—and then cut to Carey with the exclusive from the mayor’s office. From that report, she segued into the murder story:

  “This major story breaks exclusively on Channel Three just as police officials are huddling on another nightmarish problem: A killer is stalking Twin Cities women, and before he strikes, he apparently lures them into posing nude.”

  Lucas sat up. “That’s not right,” he said to the television.

  “Close enough for TV work,” Del said.

  The drawing of Aronson appeared on the screen, ass included. “Julie Aronson was strangled eighteen months ago by a man who apparently had intimate knowledge of her.”

  “Gonna scare the shit out of the other women,” Marcy said. “I mean, we’re gonna get some attention. I better call them.”

  “That’s what we wanted,” Lucas said. “Attention.” They watched as the Channel Three reporter came up, on tape, with the details, and then Marcy was on, with an explanation.

  “Great blouse button,” Del said, leering at her.

  “Fuck you, it just fell open,” Marcy said, flushing.

  “No, no, don’t say that,” Lucas said. “That’s great technique. If you hadn’t thought of it, I would have suggested it, except I probably wouldn’t have thought of it. But you know, it doesn’t hurt to have a sexy cop talking to TV. Gives you some leverage, God help us all.”

  “Look at the way they framed you. Not just your face, but from the cleavage up,” Del said. “That is really good.”

  “It just occurred to me that there’ve only been two women on the newscast,” Marcy said. “And you’ve slept with both of them, Lucas. Was Carey better than me, or was I better?”

  Del looked at Lucas and said, “Run.”

  THE TWO STORIES on Channel Three pulled all the other TV stations and both newspapers into City Hall. The mayor confirmed that he would not be running and Rose Marie outlined what was known in the Aronson case, correcting the impression that more than one woman had been threatened.

  Rose Marie called as soon as she was off the air. “I assume that was you, pulling strings with Carey.”

  “Yeah. They owe us.”

  “Good. Talk to you tomorrow. I’m gonna go home and cry.”

  Lucas hung up, looked at his watch, then called Weather and suggested they get together for a late sandwich.

  “I’ll bring pajamas,” she said.

  “Yeah? You have any idea how old I am?”

  “Not nearly as old as you’re gonna be by midnight.”

  He was pulling on his jacket when the phone rang again. He thought it might be Weather with a quick call-back. “Yeah?”

  “Lucas?” A man’s voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Gerry Haack. You remember me?”

  “Yeah, Gerry. What’s happening?” Lucas looked at his watch again.

  “I’m the lawn-care guy. I had that thing.”

  The thing with crystal meth and the rampage through the men’s fine accessories department at Dayton’s. “Yeah, yeah, what can I do for you?”

  “You said I owed you, and I should call if I ever got anything. I got something.”

  “Yeah?” Weather would be walking out the door already. “What you got?”

  “I’m not in the lawn business anymore, I’m working at the Cobra Lounge over in St. Paul. It’s not the greatest place, but I’m trying to get back on my feet, you know—”

  “That’s great, Gerry. So, what you got?”

  “You know this woman that got strangled? Aronson?”

  “Yes.”

  “I just saw the picture on TV, but they didn’t say anything about her selling it.”

  “What?”

  “She was on the corner, man.” Haack’s voice dropped a half-octave and got cozy. Man-to-man.

  “What?What’re you talking about?”

  “She was doing the hokey-pokey for money,” Haack said.

  “You know that for sure?”

  “Yeah. I know a guy she dated a couple of times. Cost him a hundred bucks a time, nothing but blow jobs and straight fucking. Nothing kinky. They sit around here and talk about it at night.”

  “You say you know him?”

  “Well, yeah. You couldn’t ever tell him who let on. They’d kill me.” Now his voice was nervous, as though he were having second thoughts about the tip.

  “Nobody’ll know,” Lucas said. “What’s his name?”

  AFTER TALKING TO Haack, Lucas stole another ten minutes to go back through the file on Aronson. Swanson noted that he’d searched state and national records on her and checked her fingerprints with the feds, and she’d come up clean. Still, if Aronson had been on the corner, somebody should have picked it up.

  He’d worked himself into a fury by the time he arrived at the restaurant. “How in the hell can you have a criminal investigation going on for a year, and you don’t know the chick is hustling?”

  “It wasn’t going on for a year. It was a halfhearted missing-persons investigation for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, and then it wasn’t anything,” Weather said. “And maybe she was an amateur. You said she’d never been arrested.”

  “But you gotta know that stuff,” he said. “You gotta talk to enough people that you find it out. Now there’s a question about these other women. Are they pros? One of them claims that she’s still a virgin—not that anybody got out his flashlight and looked. If they’re pros, then we’ve got a whole other problem than the one we started with.”

  “Is that bad, or is that good?”

  He thought about it and said, finally, “Too early to tell. Actually, it might be good. If the guy is hitting on hookers, we’ve limited the number of people we have to look at, and I’ve got pretty good connections in the area.”

  “So twelve hours into the investigation, you’re already a genius. And you look like you’re enjoying yourself, pissed off as you are.”

  “Hmph.” He remembered the mayor’s announcement. “Did you watch any TV tonight?”

  “No. Were you on?”

  “No, but there were a couple of stories . . . . The thing is, I might be out of a job in a few months.” He told her about it, and the unlikeliness that he’d be reappointed by a new chief.

  “So if we do get pregnant, we won’t have to find a nanny,” Weather said.

  “That’s not exactly how . . . You’re jerking my chain. This is serious.”

  “If you really want to keep the job, you can figure out a way to do it,” Weather said. “But maybe it’s time to try something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t k
now. Something else. You’ve done one thing all of your life. Maybe you could do something . . .”

  He picked up her direction. “Kinder and gentler.”

  “Yeah. Maybe,” she said. “You were sorta good at business.” Lucas had briefly been the nominal CEO of a computer company that produced simulations for police 911 systems. He’d hired another guy for the job as soon as he could, and had gone back to the police department.